SOURCE: "The Concept of Death in Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Philosophical Approach," in Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2, Fall-Winter, 1981-82, pp. 91-7.

In the following essay, Colilli uses philological criticism to study the concept of death in Pasolini's poems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate briefly the application of philological criticism to the study and interpretation of poetry, and in particular to a selected poem of Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to examine the claim by philological critics that a specific word is not used repetitively and randomly by the poet. In fact, as is generally believed by philological critics, a diachronic study of a specific word in its context of occurrence usually demonstrates that it contains a semantic configuration which forms a psycholinguistic frame, or "charge", that determines both lexical and overall poetic structure. In the present case we shall concentrate on...